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The Global Justice and Solidarity Movement and the World Social Forum : a Backgrounder

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The Global Justice and Solidarity Movement and the World Social Forum : a Backgrounder THE GLOBAL JUSTICE AND SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT AND THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM : A BACKGROUNDER Peter Waterman he WSF is probably best identified with the recent international wave of protest T known as the 'anti-globalisation movement'. While intimately interrelated with the latter, the WSF is just one emanation of this much more general phenomenon and process. How can these and their inter-relationship be best understood ? It is possible to make a 19th-20th century comparison, with the relationship between trade unions or labour parties on the one hand and 'the labour movement' on the other. But the labour movement, whilst obviously broader and looser than any particular institution, and having international expression, consisted largely of other, primarily national, institutions (co-operatives, women's organisations, publications). The WSF is an essentially international event (or an expanding series of such). And on the other hand, we have an essentially international movement that might not even (yet ?) recognise itself as such. So we are confronted with two new social phenomena — of the period of globalisation, that are both international and global, and that have a novel relationship with each other. The WSF — promoted by an identifiable group of Brazilian, French and other non-governmental organisations, trade unions and individuals — is itself linked organically to the more general movement. This is through an informal Forum event, known as the ‘Call of Social Movements’, which has been attended, and its regular declarations signed, by many WSF participant bodies (see this volume). The Call formalised itself between WSF2-3 with a Social Movements International Secretariat. But this body, or tendency, is a matter of discomfort for those within the WSF who want to see the Forum as a 'space' rather than a 'movement'.1 The 'Global Justice and Solidarity Movement' (GJ&SM) is actually a name proposed by the Call, for the general wave of protest against corporate-dominated globalisation, against US-sponsored neoliberalism / neo-conservatism and war, one name for the new wave of radical-democratic protest and counter-proposition. This The WSF : Challenging Empires 'movement of movements' is marked by its network form and communication activity; a matter recognised by friends and enemies alike.2 Moreover, 'it' seems to change size, shape, reach, scale, target and aims according to events. So, at one moment it might be focussed against neoliberal economic globalisation, at another against the US-led war on Iraq. This makes it even more challenging to analyse than to name. Like any novel phenomenon, the GJ&SM is easier to characterise by what it is not than by what it is : ◗ It is not an international labour or socialist movement, though unions and socialists are prominently involved; ◗ It is not a 'transnational advocacy network',3 though it is much marked by the presence of international and national NGOs; ◗ It is not a reincarnation of the international protest wave following Antecedents : Critical Perspectives 1968, though Che Guevara icons are still popular, and it includes other clear echoes of the sixties and seventies; ◗ It is not an anarchist movement, though anarchists, autonomists and libertarians are highly active within it; ◗ It is not a nationalist or thirdworldist movement, though nationalist, thirdworldist and anti-imperialist forces and notes can be clearly identified within it; It is, on the other hand, not too difficult to identify a rising number of processes that have provoked this movement. These include : ◗ the increasing predominance, in the international sphere, of multinational corporations and international financial institutions, along with the neoliberal policies that have been imposed on both North and the South (Table); ◗ The shrinking of the public sphere and reduction of State social programmes and subsidies; ◗ the feminisation of poverty, the commodification of women (the sex trade), the simultaneous formal endorsement and political denial of women's and sexual rights; ◗ de-industrialisation, unemployment and the informalisation of employment; ◗ the ideology of competitiveness as the court of first and last appeal; ◗ the undermining of market protection (primarily of weaker national economies); ◗ the simultaneous preaching and practical undermining of traditional structures and notions of national sovereignty; ◗ the simultaneous creation of new international institutions and regulations, alongside the marginalisation of the United Nations and such agencies as the International Labour Organisation (ILO); ◗ increasing talk of and the continuing undermining of ecological sustainability; corporate attempts to copyright genetic resources, to genetically modify foodstuffs, to commercialise them and then coerce people into buying them; the continuation and even increase of militarism, militarisation and warfare despite hopes raised by the end of the Cold War; 56 The WSF : Challenging Empires ◗ the increase in globalised epidemics and threats to the climate; GJ & ◗ the demonisation of immigrants, asylum-seekers, and of Islam and other SM : Backgrounder Waterman Peter 'others'. All these have dramatically raised social tensions, particularly in the South, but also in the East (the ex-Communist world) and even in such model core capitalist welfare states as Canada and Sweden. The pressures have also provoked major conservative, reactionary, religious and ethnic backlashes, of a violent and repressive nature, sometimes internationally co-ordinated. Many identify the new protest movements of the emerging century with the North — Seattle 1999, Prague 2000, Genoa 2001, Gothenburg 2001, Barcelona 2002, Evian 2003. They also associate it with the middle classes, students and youth, who have indeed been prominent within it. But so have women, forming around 50 per cent at the World Social Forums, though this is little commented on. But the movement cannot be limited to major protest events, nor to what has occurred since 1999. It must be traced both back and down, at least to the ‘food riots’ provoked by the IMF in the South of the eighties, when there were urban uprisings against the externally-imposed end of food subsidies. Widespread protests against gigantic and ecologically damaging dam projects, promoted by the World Bank and developmentalist local elites, go back to the eighties and earlier. There were major demonstrations and riots against the poll tax in Britain in 1990. Through the 1990s, there were myriad protests across the South against the euphemistically-named Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) in particular, and neoliberal policies more generally. And the appearance of the often corporatist, sometimes chauvinist and commonly quiescent US AFL-CIO on the anti-WTO demonstration in Seattle, was welcomed — (somewhat prematurely ?) — by the slogan ‘Teamsters and Turtles : Together at Last!’.4 One major manifestation of US-initiated neoliberalism has been the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which provoked widespread protest in both Canada and Mexico. In the case of Canada, it turned an initial national-protectionist campaign into one of international solidarity, first with Mexico, then with Latin America more generally, leading to the Hemispheric Social Alliance, which included the USA. In the case of Mexico, the launching date of the NAFTA, January 1, 1994, was used for the launching also of the Zapatista movement in the severely globalised, marginalised and exploited state of Chiapas, in the South of Mexico.5 Initially appearing as a classical armed guerrilla movement based on the discriminated and land-hungry Mayan ethnic communities of Chiapas, the Zapatistas rapidly revealed entirely novel characteristics : an address to Mexican civil society, a high-profile internationalism, a sophisticated understanding and use of both the mass media and alternative electronic communications. All can be found in the speeches and writings of its primary spokesperson, Sub-Commander Marcos (Rafael Guillén) a university-educated non-indigene, trained in guerrilla warfare in Cuba. Activities of the Zapatistas, particularly two international encuentros, one in Chiapas, 1996, one in Spain, 1997, gave rise, or shape, to a new wave of internationalism. The powerful, poetic and playful words of Marcos, who switches between, or combines, popular 57 The WSF : Challenging Empires Mayan and Mexican idiom with the language of cosmopolitan intellectuals, enchanted a dulled world. It had a dramatic appeal on several fronts. An international Left, battered, bruised and disoriented by : the downscaling of the welfare state; the downsizing of the working class; the halting of the forward march of labour; the collapse of Eastern Communist and Southern Populist states; and the crisis of the international movements identified with such. Zapatista encounters also inspired at least two significant emanations of the movement, People’s Global Action (PGA) and the WSF itself.6 Other major sources of, or contributors to the new movement must be mentioned particularly the rising wave of protest against unemployment, privatisation and cuts in social services gathering steam throughout the nineties, markedly in Europe and the increasing development of ‘counter-expertise’, concentrated in international and national NGOs which had been honed at a series of UN conferences and summits through the 1990s — notably the 1992 World Conference on Environment and Development and the Antecedents : Critical Perspectives 1995 UN Fourth World
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